Is Microsoft Anti-Spyware 100% reliable? I tend to run two of everything and rotate through a cycle of scans of each product.
My kids are not too bad, but I do get the occasional malware appearing on their machine.
Example: I ran Ewido, and it identified backdoor.genlot.dx trojan. It has picked up this one before and others. Microsoft Anti-Spyware has never picked up one yet. Now maybe thats just the luck of the draw coinciding with when its run, and when I'm infected, but I looked into the MS Anti-spyware log, and found that it had permitted pohci13F.sys to run, which was the file with that trojan onboard. It also did not pick up the trojan once it was installed.
I have the following installed and cycle their scans:
AVG free edition (and run Housecall online as an occasional backup)
Spybot search and destroy
Spyware Blaster
Lavasoft Ad-aware
Microsoft Anti-Spyware
Ewido
Also run CCleaner daily
Keep an eye on things with
Hijack This and Rootkit Revealer weekly
Now, there are programs in there that claim to catch spyware /malware 'on the fly' but stuff still gets through.
I'll continue to run belt and braces, but on the basis of detection in my experience, I would be comfortable with running AVG with Ewido, and uninstalling the rest. That said, Ad-Aware is good but not as good as Ewido.
I am going to get round to paying for Ewido for the real-time upgrade, I think its worth it.
Last edited by Cheerio; 30th Aug 2006 at 09:18.